2 Trenton Schools Begin an Experiment With Year-Round Classes

By NEIL MacFARQUHAR

Published: July 22, 1995

TRENTON, July 21—
Jay Butler, age 9, had a distinctly negative reaction when the Trenton schools heralded their status as the first district in the Northeast to try year-round classes by adopting the motto "The School that Never Closes" for Joyce Kilmer Elementary.

"I thought I would throw up," he said.

Nonetheless, Jay, a fourth grader, donned his backpack today and was clambering around with about 330 other students anticipating the first bell of the school year. "Now I think it will help me learn more," he said.

That is a crucial argument for the expanded schedule, designed so that teachers and students are never apart for more than four weeks. Experimenting with different formulas at the first two schools to try the new schedules, the new calendar will mean 20 additional school days for the students at Kilmer Elementary and 30 days for 200 students at Mott School, which begins its year-round program on Monday. (The choice was optional for all involved, so a total of about 360 students at both schools will follow a traditional September-to-June school year.)

"Parents don't like to experiment with their kids," said Dr. Bernice P. Venable, Superintendent of Trenton schools, who hopes the year-round schedule will eventually spread to all of the district's 23 schools and 13,000 students. "But if you want to see significant academic gains, you have to cut down on the number of consecutive days the children are out of school."

New York City will get its first taste of year-round calendars next year when three high schools are expected to adopt a schedule that most Western and Southern states, notably California and Texas, have used for about three decades, usually to alleviate overcrowding.

Tampering with the school calendar, long fixed in Western nations by the harvest season, is an emotional issue. Traditionalists charge that eliminating the extended summer vacation unravels yet more thread from the fabric of American family life, while proponents argue that the deplorable state of public education can only be reversed by such change.

"When 90 percent of the society was agrarian, children had to have the summer off for the harvest," said John Goulding, principal at Kilmer Elementary. " But how many farmers are there now in Trenton? In New York City?"

The jousting is not limited to parents and schools. Organizations like the International Association of Amusement Parks and Attractions, whose members include giants like Disney World, funnel money into lobbying groups to fight year-round schooling.

Supporters say that shorter summer vacations mean students retain more from year to year; that the schedule provides flexibility for extra tutoring, field trips or other academic enhancements; that more frequent breaks stave off both teacher and student burnout, and that school districts can save money by getting more use out of otherwise idle buildings and avoiding the need to build new ones.

Opponents say that savings are minimized by the need to run air conditioning systems -- and sometimes even to install them -- and by extra pay for teachers. They also argue that working parents will be stuck for day care options during October and April breaks; that siblings' having different schedules will lead to family chaos; that the schedule plays havoc with older students who want to play football, join the band or keep to the national schedule for college placement exams, and that it will reduce the amount of time that teachers can spend updating their own studies.

Fans of the system say it helps academic results, while those against it say there is no marked increase in achievement. The variety of testing procedures nationwide and results that differ in poor and affluent neighborhoods make it nearly impossible to draw sweeping conclusions. But both sides agree that extra classroom hours improve the performance of poor children.

The first year-round school started 27 years ago in Hayward, Calif.; now the schedule has spread to about 2,250 schools with 1.6 million students, or about four percent of the nation's schools, said Dr. Charles E. Ballinger, executive director of the National Association for Year-Round Education, which is based in San Diego. New Jersey is the 39th state to open year-round schools. The three or four schools in the Northeast that already have such calendars are either private or isolated magnet schools in public systems.

New York City's public schools are hoping that a staggered calendar will allow them to get more students into their buildings at a time when money for new construction is unlikely, said John J. Ferrandino, the superintendent for the city's 162 high schools.

He said the school buildings are now about 30,000 seats short for a high school population of 312,000 and are likely to be at least 45,000 seats short in the year 2000. By staggering the schedules so that two-thirds of the students are in school and one-third always on breaks, officials hope to increase the capacity of the buildings by 35 percent.

Public meetings on the issue are likely to start late this year, although the timing has been thrown into question by the resignation of Schools Chancellor Ramon C. Cortines.